Amazing images have been at the core of Canadian Geographic throughout its nearly 90-year history. To expand the magazine’s commitment to photographic excellence, Canadian Geographic created a new Photographer-in-Residence program.

Its mission: to share compelling visual storytelling that celebrates and explores the nation’s geography, people and wildlife to make Canada better known to Canadians and the world.

To fulfill this mandate, the magazine has named two of the country’s best photographers as its first Photographers-in-Residence: Neil Ever Osborne and Michelle Valberg. Osborne is a renowned visual storyteller and a vocal advocate of conservation photography. Valberg is well-known largely for her stunning wildlife and landscape images, particularly from Canada’s Arctic.

The man known as Guujaaw, the former president of the Council of the Haida Nation, lays chinook salmon over the rafters of his smokehouse in Skidegate, a community on British Columbia’s Haida Gwaii archipelago. Salmon has long played a key role in the Haida way of life, acting as both a food source and a symbol of fertility and abundance. (Photo: Neil Ever Osborne)

Locals perform a traditional drum dance and song on Devon Island, Nunavut. This image will be featured on an upcoming coin in the Royal Canadian Mint’s Celebrating Canada’s 150th coin series. (Photo: Michelle Valberg)

A hot air balloon flies between icebergs on the frozen ocean near Arctic Bay, Nunavut. (Photo: Michelle Valberg)

Jim Coneybeare tends to his bee hives in Fergus, Ont. “I have some locations that are producing one-tenth of what I would normally have,” says Coneybeare of the dwindling populations of bees. (Photo: Neil Ever Osborne)

Ontario’s Point Pelee National Park is one of Canada’s smallest protected spaces, but it contains one of the largest coastal wetlands on the Great Lakes. (Photo: Neil Ever Osborne)

A grandfather and grandson on the beach in Gjoa Haven, Nunavut, in their traditional caribou clothing used for hunting. (Photo: Michelle Valberg)

Night monkeys, also known as owl monkeys or douroucoulis, are members of the genus Aotus of New World monkeys. The only nocturnal monkeys, they are native to Panama and much of tropical South America, including these from Ecuador’s Tiputini Biodiversity Station. (Photo: Neil Ever Osborne)

A feral horse on Nova Scotia’s Sable Island. This image was featured on the cover of the Spring 2015 issue of Canadian Geographic Travel magazine. (Photo: Michelle Valberg)

One adult southern rockhopper penguin leads a group of young chicks into the sea at the Falkland Islands. Over the last 60 years, the species’ numbers here have declined by 90 percent. (Photo: Neil Ever Osborne)